Hina Naqvi has Done it All

November 1, 2017

If you’re an avid user of Adobe products, it’s very likely you’ve experienced Hina’s work. After all, she’s been working at Adobe for over 15 years and has a career that spans working on several products, including Adobe LiveCycle PDF Generator, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Document Center, Acrobat.com, Creative Cloud Assets and Adobe Bridge CC.

During her tenure at Adobe, Hina has been an accomplished computer scientist and most recently, a Senior Product Manager. And that’s not including the time she was an intern.

“When I originally joined Adobe as an intern I was making Acrobat plug-ins. I worked on a spell-check feature, and no one really cared about it at the time. But then it became part of the products, so that’s pretty cool!” Can you say very cool? Not many people can say they’ve had the same experience. “I mean, while I was an intern, I got to present to John Warnock, one of Adobe’s co-founders,” she laughed.

With such a long history of working on Adobe products, I asked Hina to pick her brain a little and see if she could pinpoint a favorite project she’s worked on. “That’s hard! But I think it’s probably when I worked on a feature to that would convert a PDF into a Word document. At the time we weren’t sure how it would be received. But I was put on a team that was assigned to run a pilot of it. Now it’s one of the most subscribed cloud services today. I’m proud that I got to work on the project and that it became such a big deal.”

And having the opportunity to make big impact in multiple teams is what’s helped Hina navigate her career. “When people outside of Adobe realize that I’ve worked here for 15 years, they’re always surprised. They say ‘Oh my gosh, you’ve been there forever!’ But I always felt like I had mobility within the company—and it’s encouraged, so it didn’t feel like I was standing still,” she said.

Oh and did I mention that she’s participated in Adobe Kickbox, an internal program that helps employees become inventors, and has taken product management courses at the University of California, Berkeley? Of the Kickbox experience, Hina said, “Being a part of Kickbox was a great experience. I was able to form a real idea about a new product area, which was also validated by subject matter experts. The whole experience piqued my interest in product management. From there, I started meeting with product managers at Adobe to talk about their experience. Then one senior product manager took a chance on me, a senior computer scientist, to lead a team as a product manager.”

As for what’s next in store for Hina? She’s currently a senior product manager focused on Adobe Creative Cloud Web & Adobe Bridge products. She’s working on the next iteration of asset management and looking at how Adobe can use machine learning to do deep searches on content. From PDF conversions to machine learning. Hina’s certainly come a long way.

“What I love about being at Adobe is that I’ve been able to keep my skillset current and applicable. The work I’ve been doing has been amazing and I’m always learning the newest skills for the projects I’m working on. I have grown personally and professionally as a person at Adobe. As an intern to where I am in my career today,” she said.